[Eve] PLEXcapade

Today was a fabulous day in New Eden. Today my net worth broke 1,000,000,000 ISK* for the first time. I wish I could claim this was the result of my being some smarter than average capitalist, or a titan of industry, but the fact is, I got lucky. It was a simple case of being in the right place, at the right time and doing something about the information.

It was just a little PLEXcapade, but I netted just over 500,000,000 ISK in a few short hours.

This requires a little background to set the stage for how and why I was watching the PLEX markets this morning…

As our loyal readers know, my Corp recently moved into a Wormhole, which we purchased from a Wormhole Broker. During the day, our fearless leader was at work, and with him, access to the Corp funds we intended to spend to close the deal. In order to be prepared with the proper liquidity in case the deal went down, I bought a PLEX from CCP, and converted it to ISK in-game, via the market. My intention was to use the funds (or not) and simply convert the ISK, back to PLEX at a favorable price, and export it to game time, after the deal was done.

One thing led to another and I got sidetracked with moving, so I never did convert back to PLEX, but I kept the ISK away from my main account so I wouldn’t spend it. I made a few half-hearted deals with it to generate some cash because my main accounts were starting to get low due to some mishaps as well as a few hundred million ISK invested in supplies and infrastructure for the wormhole. In the meantime, I have logged my Jita/ Amarr account level trade alts in daily to check the PLEX prices to maximize the trade out, but hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Fast forward to this morning… As I logged on, something caught my eye as I was doing my casual PLEX price check… a 90,000,000 ISK difference between the BUY and SELL respectively between the two regions… the typically rational markets were doing something decidedly irrational! I bought a PLEX, hopped my alt into his shiny Amarr shuttle, and set out to cash in on this bizarre occurence. (While in flight, I renamed the shuttle, Mitas.)

After patting myself on the back for my clever 71,000,000 profit for almost no effort, and very little time (90,000,000 – broker fees and taxes =71m net) I double checked the PLEX prices. It had changed nearly 30,000,000, but still posed a very lucrative opportunity I couldn’t overlook. So I just started shuttling them back and forth.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that the prices had spiked as a result of speculators guessing at the impact of the new promotional offer that CCP is running… where a Pilot can trade 20 PLEX for a brand new NVIVIA 560 GPU. Ironically, they are only offering 100 of these promotions, so the practical impact on the PLEX market should be very small, but for a tiny part of the day, a blink of an eye, the impact was catastrophic.

As of this writing, the prices have all but stabilized, but you can see the remnants with large Sell orders still sitting unfulfilled in the 580,000,000 range, which is over 100m above the standard market average. The opportunity is gone, but not before I cashed out a half billion dollars, and the PLEX I started with.

~Cyndre

I placed an * in the first line of this post because, while my current net worth is over 1,000,000,000, I paid real money for 480,000,000 ISK of that total which I intend to export out to game time, so I don’t consider it to count officially, though it was cool to see that number in my Wallet.